‘Just like old times,’ he says predictably. He seems very relaxed: perhaps it means much less to him to be there than it does to her to have him there. ‘But your work’s changing a lot.’
‘Yes, it is.’ And so am I, she thinks.
‘I like it,’ he says.
‘Does that mean you didn’t like it before?’
‘Oh no,’ he says, laughing, ‘I’m not getting caught like that.’
He takes her out to dinner and they go back to the studio to make love before they go off to their separate homes.
‘We must do this again,’ he says, ‘in the afternoon.’
And they meet several times that month, more than they ever have before, and she can’t believe her luck. Making love very gently in the hazy warmth of the summer afternoon with street noises outside, the smell of the studio mixed with their own special scent.
‘You know what we’re doing,’ he says. ‘We’re pretending to be young again. Now all we need is some fruit and Sally aged four coming back from nursery school.’
She feels acknowledged: he hasn’t forgotten their shared past. ‘And you not going home to Laura,’ she says, greatly daring. ‘Just to make a change.’
‘Oh,’ he says with a long sigh, ‘if you only knew how often I nearly didn’t go.’
Later when she thinks about it, that must have been when it happened. On one of those dreamy afternoons.
* * *
Kate is often angry and he finds her anger attractive, making her a more interesting person. He thinks of the old film cliché: ‘God, you’re beautiful when you’re angry, Miss Jones,’ with the hero removing the heroine’s glasses and a few hairpins, letting long hair spill out from a confining bun. It isn’t quite that, for nothing can make Kate beautiful, but anger causes her plain face to light up with energy, as if someone has switched on a lamp inside her. He remembered Felix saying with envy in his voice, ‘You always marry such beautiful women,’ and how the realisation warmed him, that Felix could want something Richard had and be obliged to do without it. Well, Felix had finally had Inge, briefly, but that doesn’t matter now; he will never have Helen, that is certain, and Richard is savagely glad. But it disturbs him to be thinking about Kate in this context. Surely he isn’t regarding her as a potential wife? And surely he isn’t still bonded in some way to Felix, with all his destructive charm? It worries him that thoughts like that can come into his mind at all.
Kate is angry about life and politics and the state of the world. She is angry with the government and their educational policy, or lack of it. She talks a lot about this and he listens and agrees with her, admiring her energy. He thinks she is right but he is too exhausted to express himself so forcefully. One day they talk about writers and he discovers she is angry with them too.
‘I don’t think I like writers very much,’ she says. ‘They think they own the world and ordinary rules don’t apply to them. Perhaps all creative people are like that but writers are the worst. Everything is grist to their mill. They cannibalise everyone they meet.’
‘It’s ironic for two teachers to think like that,’ he suggests. ‘All those authors we have to recommend.’
‘It’s not ironic at all,’ Kate says. ‘Most of them are dead. I prefer them that way.’
He laughs. He has a sudden memory of Felix lying unconscious on the floor and wonders if he really wanted him to die.
‘The best of them goes into their books,’ Kate says.
‘I suppose so.’
‘Living with them simply doesn’t work,’ she says. ‘The magic wears awfully thin after a while.’
She smiles at him and pours more tea for them both. They are becoming friends.
* * *
Encouraged by all this Helen says, ‘I suppose you wouldn’t fancy a holiday with me? Sally’s going to Greece in August, she’ll be away a couple of months. I thought maybe we could go somewhere for a few days.’
‘Oh, I’m going to the States for six weeks,’ he says, without apology. ‘I promised Susie a trip. We’re going to stay with Mara in New York and then drive across and see lake in L.A. It’s about time I checked up on them both.’
‘Very nice.’ She’s disappointed, and angry at the casual way he mentions it. She wonders when or even if he would have told her, if she hadn’t brought up the subject.
‘You wouldn’t like me on holiday anyway,’ he says. ‘I’m no good at relaxing. I get very moody away from the studio.’
‘Poor old Susie.’
‘Oh, it’s different for daughters. They know how to handle me.’
* * *
‘Fancy a drink?’ Kate says after the PTA meeting, and they stroll down the road to the pub together. This time last year, he thinks, he was at the end of his first term and Inge had just suggested therapy. Sometimes he still feels dizzy with disbelief at the way his life has changed.
‘D’you have any plans for the summer?’ Kate asks when they are settled in a corner with a pint and a half of bitter.
‘Not really. I don’t think I can afford a holiday this year.’
‘I know the feeling. The kids and I are going down to Suffolk to stay with my parents for the whole of August, that’s the nearest I’ll get to a break. At least my mother will be on hand to help, and there’ll be country things for them to do. They get bored in London, they aren’t old enough to be cultured. Then David’s having them for the first week in September, so I’ll get a few days to myself before term starts. I shall have a feast of theatre, I think.’
‘Very nice.’
‘Well, it will make a change.’ She hesitates. ‘If I have any spare tickets would you like to come?’
‘Yes.’ He’s surprised. ‘I’d love to.’
‘I thought maybe something at the National or the RSC. Well. Good. I’ll give you a ring during the holidays then.’
What they have just said feels like such an enormous step, planning a date in September and arranging to telephone in August, that they absolutely must not draw attention to it with silence. They both rush into the empty space and collide.
‘Do you think—’
‘Have you been—’
‘Sorry.’
‘Sorry.’
They laugh nervously.
‘Go on.’
‘Oh, gloomy thoughts, I’m afraid,’ she says, smiling to lighten the words. ‘I was wondering if our children will ever recover from all this and what sort of marriages they’ll have. I mean, will it make them try harder or will they just think that breaking up is normal and doesn’t really matter?’
‘I don’t know – but I’ve often thought the same thing.’
‘I mean our parents’ generation stayed together mostly, didn’t they, and yet nearly all my friends have split up like me and some re-married. Some have even split up twice. What is it? Do we all expect too much or what?’
It’s a chance he may not get again, an easy casual route to his guilty past, and he must take it if they are to become friends. The longer he leaves it without telling her, the more it will look like deceit. ‘I don’t know. I wish I did. But I’m afraid I’m one of the ones who’ve split up twice.’
‘Oh, Richard.’ He can see her struggling with compassion and disapproval and surprise. ‘I’m sorry. That doesn’t seem like you, somehow.’
‘No, that’s exactly how I feel about it. In fact the highlight of my holiday will be seeing my step-daughter next week, if all goes according to plan.’
‘I didn’t know you had a step-daughter, I thought you just had two teenage boys. How old is she?’
‘She’s twenty now. And I’ve known her since she was eight.’
‘Heavens. So she really is like your own.’
‘Yes. More than my own, I sometimes think.’ Tears prick his eyes at the mention of Sally and he feels foolish. He thought he’d got over that but it still happens sometimes, taking him by surprise. ‘She’s at Sussex, reading English. Her mother is my second wife but when I separated in April that w
as from my first wife …’ He stops. It sounds terrible. Both complicated and damning. ‘I couldn’t explain at the time.’
Kate says gently, ‘Perhaps it would be easier if you tell me their names.’
‘You’re very understanding.’ He’s surprised how much he wants to tell her now. ‘Well, Inge and I got married too young. We had Karl and Peter, but it was never really right. And then I met Helen.’
He pauses. Kate says nothing; she has a listening expression. He tries again.
‘I was entirely to blame. Inge didn’t do anything wrong. Well, I felt devoured by her but that wasn’t her fault. I just fell in love with Helen. She was divorced when I met her, she’s a painter, she was living alone with her daughter.’
He pauses. So many memories rush back. His first sight of her at the exhibition. That cold Nordic face that encompassed all his dreams. Going to the studio. Making love. Meeting Sally. Two years’ hard deception and then telling Inge. The blood on the sheets and the ambulance siren. He drags himself back to the present.
‘I don’t think I’d ever really been in love before, it was such a shock. We lived together for eight years. I thought it was for ever. Then when we split up I went back to Inge and the boys. But that didn’t work either, it was for all the wrong reasons… well, that’s where you came in.’
He still doesn’t feel he’s been honest. Perhaps he never can be. It’s all too painful. It would take too long. And it would show him in a very bad light. Perhaps it already has.
‘Yes,’ Kate says softly. ‘What a shame. Poor you.’
‘Well, poor everyone.’
There is a long silence. He looks at their empty glasses. ‘Same again?’
‘I do hope not,’ Kate says, and they manage to smile. ‘But I could use another half. Let me get them this time.’
‘Not at all.’
When he comes back with their drinks she is looking thoughtful. He feels embarrassed. He says, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve been talking too much.’
‘No. It’s just so sad. All these poor kids we’re all dragging around with us while we make our mistakes.’
‘Or leaving behind.’
‘Yes. It’s worse for men, I think. The guilt. I don’t think they ever recover, some of them.’
He doesn’t know what to say to that. ‘Do you see much of your ex-husband?’
‘As little as possible. It was a great love and when that turns sour… Well, you know.’ She makes a little helpless gesture with her hands. ‘He’s a writer and he’s manic depressive. Well, I think he is. His moods were quite terrifying but he wouldn’t admit there was anything wrong, just his artistic temperament and all that. He’d be all over me one day and ice cold the next. The poor kids never knew where they were with him. In the end he became a sort of house-husband. I had to earn the money while he wrote his book. Everything I did at home was wrong. He wrote all night so we had to creep about all day. It took him ten years to get anything published. Frankly, when I read the book and remember what we all went through, I don’t think it was worth it. But that’s just my opinion.’
Richard says, ‘I used to have a friend who was a writer.’
Kate has on her most severe face. He can see why she never has any discipline problems at school. ‘I think they’re a breed apart. Really. There’s a coldness at the centre, a sort of greed for experience, a basic selfishness. I don’t know, perhaps it’s unfair to generalise. David was like that, perhaps your friend was lovely.’
What can he say to that? He doesn’t want to tell her any more; he feels he’s said too much already.
‘No, I don’t think I’d call him lovely,’ he says, ‘but I miss him.’
‘What happened – did you quarrel?’
‘Yes, in a way.’
‘Well, maybe it wasn’t meant to last. I used to think all friendships were for ever but now I think they have a natural lifespan, rather like house plants. If marriage doesn’t last for ever, even with children, why should friendship? I’ve lost a few along the way. But you make new ones eventually.’
She sounds so calm, as if she has got her life under control at last. He wonders if she will phone him in August, if they will go to the theatre in September. He thinks it’s not at all by chance that they have had such an intimate conversation at nearly the end of term. They will have six weeks to get over it.
* * *
‘Stay with me, Elizabeth,’ David says, just as she’s leaving.
‘You know I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Felix would worry.’
‘Doesn’t he stay out?’
‘No, never.’ She hears herself sound proud of this fact; she also remembers the night when he did stay out, because Richard had tried to kill him. She re-lives it fast, like a clip from a film, or an old recurrent nightmare: Helen at her door with bad news, breaking it gently, terrifying her – Felix in the hospital and the doctor being kind. She shivers and thinks for a moment, What am I doing here with David? I made a bargain with God. If he let Felix live I’d never complain about anything ever again. I’m behaving like an ungrateful child.
‘You could phone him.’ Now David sounds like a sulky little boy. He looks like one too, with his heavy bottom lip almost pouting. She sits on the side of the bed and pushes his dark shiny hair back from his forehead, which feels hot and damp. She kisses it. Now she’s a mother who should be dosing him with junior aspirin, considering a day off school. She can’t believe they’ve just made love. Surely he’s the child she never had. She wants to laugh and cry at the same time. But most of all she wants to go home. In this context Felix suddenly appears grown up, undemanding, reliable.
‘He knows about me. What’s the difference?’ David says.
‘It’s just not something we do.’ She sees him flinch at the ‘we’. ‘Anyway, you work at night. Don’t you? Those are your best hours, you told me. You don’t want to waste them on me, snoring away beside you.’ She wants to make him smile now, to jolly him along.
‘You’ve got time for a drink,’ he says authoritatively. He puts on a dressing-gown, as if he doesn’t want to be naked any more now she is clothed for departure. She watches his skinny body disappearing into the towelling-robe, thinks how vulnerable a limp cock always looks, his or Felix’s or anyone from her past. Just hanging there, at the mercy of any passing predator, with no hint of the miracles it can perform. She wants to protect it. She gives it a swift kiss while he’s tying the belt of his robe.
‘Cupboard love,’ he says, and they both laugh.
‘Just saying goodnight,’ she says. ‘Just being polite.’
‘He’s off-duty now. He doesn’t recognise you with your clothes on.’
‘Oh, really? I thought I detected a reminiscent twitch.’
‘You make him nervous. He’s afraid he might get too attached to you. He doesn’t want to get hurt.’
It’s all getting heavy and sad again. She does a mock snarl and snaps her teeth together. Now she’s reminded of coaxing a puppy to eat, pretending you’re going to steal its dinner. ‘I’ll have it. Grr.’ The early days with Felix when, he loving cats and she loving dogs, they tried having both, the perfect compromise, before ending up with neither. Animals were a tie. If you didn’t have children it was crazy to have animals. It meant you couldn’t travel. Even plants were a nuisance, needing water, making you feel guilty when they died. All this freedom, she thinks. All this carefully structured freedom.
She has Perrier because she’s driving. David has brandy. They sit in his stark black and white living-room with its minimal furniture and subdued lighting. It still doesn’t seem like a home. More an advertisement for its designer.
‘God, what do women want?’ David says suddenly. ‘Come back, Sigmund, all is forgiven. Here I am, in love with you, monogamous, devoted, and you can’t wait to scuttle back to your unfaithful husband.’
She’s embarrassed. Put like that it does sound unreasonable.
* * *
Final
ly there’s a knock at the door and it’s Sally. He has been looking forward to this moment so much. He is so pleased to see her he feels tears starting and has to blink them away. She has grown her hair again so that she looks almost the way he remembers her from the happy days and not how she was when she came to see him in prison. She looks like the child he loved and cared for all those years; she smiles and hugs him like a daughter. He wishes so much she was his own.
‘Richard,’ she says, ‘it’s so lovely to see you. I should have come before.’
‘Never mind,’ he says, ‘you’re here now. What can I offer you? Tea or a proper drink? I’ve got a bottle of wine, or there’s some beer.’
‘Tea, I think,’ she says vaguely. ‘I don’t seem to drink much any more. I want to be thin, thin, thin.’
‘Well, you are,’ he says.
She screws up her nose. ‘Not properly.’ She thumps her narrow thighs, her flat stomach. ‘I’m all flabby here. I need to lose at least ten pounds.’
He knows better than to argue. ‘So it’s no good offering you a toasted tea cake then. I bought them specially.’
‘Well… maybe half a one.’
He gets them out and puts them under the grill while he makes the tea.
‘I’ll keep an eye on them, shall I?’ Sally says.
It feels comfortable, companionable, to have her with him. He has forgotten to be ashamed of his surroundings, to apologise for the room.
‘I nearly bought a fork to toast them in front of the gas fire,’ he says. ‘That would really have felt like being back at college. But I didn’t. I thought I was being a bit silly.’
‘Are you all right here?’ she says. ‘You don’t mind living in one room?’
‘Well, it’s all the same if I do,’ he says. ‘This is all I can afford. But no, I don’t really mind. I don’t have a lot of stuff, just books and clothes and records, so I don’t feel crowded.’
‘No,’ she says, rescuing the tea cakes just in time, ‘it’s quite a big room as bedsits go. It’s a lot bigger than mine.’ She smiles at him as if they are both students now, comparing notes on college facilities.
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